This Is Why Europe Is Vulnerable to Attacks Like Barcelona

While police have arrested four people in connection with the attacks, the driver of the van is still at large after fleeing on foot. Authorities have identified 18-year-old Moussa Oukabir as the suspect, the Guardian reported based on Spanish media reports.

“This is the worst one since the 2004 attack,” Stu Burguiere said Friday on radio.

In 2004, 191 people were killed and nearly 2,000 were injured when terrorists detonated bombs on mobile phones in train stations in the Madrid area.

“Europe in and of itself is just very vulnerable to these things,” Stu noted, explaining how Europe’s more “lenient” border policies work.

PAT: It's Pat and Stu and Jeffy for the Glenn on the Glenn Beck Program. Glenn is -- can we say where he is? Maybe not, huh?

STU: Yeah.

PAT: He's doing something with Operation Underground rescue today. So he'll be back on Monday.

But another terrible terrorist strike yesterday. This one in Barcelona, Spain. The same kind of thing. The vehicles used as weapons. Killed 14 people. Just another mass carnage. Bodies strewn all over the place. And, you know, it's just so senseless and so bizarre. And this seems to be their new thing. Even -- even over explosions.

STU: We're starting to probably hit that point, in which the vehicle barriers at street festivals need to seriously be increased.

JEFFY: All of them.

PAT: Uh-huh.

STU: I mean, because I think people -- whether -- obviously there's a low risk of something like this happening at any particular festival you're at. But when they block these streets off, these are the targets, a lot of times.

You know, in a bizarre way -- it's in a way kind of like the gun-free zone with the mass shootings. It's like you take out an area where there's any chance of traffic. And people just sort of -- you know, they're all gathered in one place where they all think they're safe. And when they all think they're safe, that's when people come that are bad actors. That's obviously not an argument against street festivals. But it is an argument for security at them, I think.

PAT: Definitely. I just heard this morning that they're going to ramp up security with vehicles in mind at the Texas State Fair next month. So they're already starting to do that. They're already taking that seriously.

STU: And people won't show up if these things keep happening. People are going to stop risking --

JEFFY: Right.

PAT: Yeah. And that's the whole point, right? Of this kind of attack. You just want people to change their lifestyle. You want them to live in fear. You want to create terror. And they're doing a pretty good job of that.

So it would be -- they interviewed quite a few people who were just on vacation.

JEFFY: Yeah, this wasn't even just necessarily a street festival. This was a market where everybody gathers.

PAT: A lot of tourists.

JEFFY: Yeah.

PAT: So can you imagine, you're just going to Barcelona, Spain, for a vacation. You're having a holiday there, and this kind of thing happens. It's just -- I mean, certainly it's no worse than the locals being killed. Because they're both bad.

JEFFY: Right.

PAT: But it's just so senseless. And you just don't expect that.

STU: Yeah, that's the point I took from your comment. That it was worse than --

PAT: It's worse than the locals being killed?

JEFFY: And Americans were there on vacation.

STU: It is funny how we treat these things. The media -- like, I was watching Fox News when this was going on. And they went to report. They were like, "We have new information in that four NCAA basketball teams were playing in Spain at the time. All teams are okay." Okay. I don't know why that is relevant to this story, the fact that four --

PAT: It's the American angle, right?

STU: It is, I guess. And I'm not blaming Fox for that. I guess it is sort of interesting, particularly if you are a fan of one of the teams that is playing in that general vicinity. But the idea that -- like, three of the four teams have made a statement, and all three teams have said the same thing, that nothing happened.

Okay. I mean, it's probably -- there's probably something else in this story that you could cover at this particular moment. I'm just saying that it's possible that the basketball team, you know, being unharmed is not necessarily a story.

PAT: Right.

STU: Most people in the -- in the world were unharmed at that moment.

PAT: This does tend -- my wife and I -- I mean, we've wanted to go to Europe our whole lives. And I want to go to London. I'd love to go to Barcelona. I'd love to go to Rome. Love to go to France, even though the problem with France is the French.

(chuckling)

But I'd love to see it. I'd love to be there. I'd love to experience it. And now with all this stuff happening all the time, it does cause you to kind of wonder if you want to do that. Doesn't it? I mean, this is going to hurt tourism across the world.

STU: It is. And we're talking about a lot of people dead, a lot of people injured. I mean, the footage that you described earlier --

PAT: It was carnage.

STU: Did you notice a line that was different from other attacks, in which they showed a lot of just dead bodies on the street?

PAT: Yeah, they did. Yeah, they did.

JEFFY: Yeah.

STU: And they kept showing it over and over and over again. These were not people that were hurt. They were, I mean, motionless. No one is even tending to them. You know, it's not like -- when you have someone who is hurt and struggling, people rush over and try to help after one of these things. People were just walking by them, like this is over.

I mean, you know, a lot of people dead. A lot of gore. And they showed it for whatever reason, seemingly, without hesitance in this particular case. A lot of times they will -- you know, if you think of the clip in Charlottesville, right? Where one person died. They went to somewhat great lengths to not show you the actual person who died.

JEFFY: Right.

STU: The actual real carnage of that. They showed it from a distance. They showed parts of it. But this was really intense.

PAT: Up close and personal with all the carnage.

JEFFY: Maybe we do need to see it.

STU: There's an argument there. And I think a strong one. I don't know what you do here, right? Like, they were talking about this. There was this terrorism expert on that I was watching. And they're like, "Well, there's nothing you can do to stop these incidents. There's really no way to stop them." And that's true really about everything, right? Like there's nothing to stop someone walking up behind you with a water balloon full of red Kool-Aid and slapping it on the back of your head every time you walk down the street. The only reason it doesn't happen is because no one is interested in doing it, right? Anyone can do it to you at any time.

And that's the only way that this is going to eventually stop, hopefully. That eventually we get to a point in which people are not motivated by this thing. White supremacy, we've gone a long way in essentially eliminating. And it's a weird thing to say after Charlottesville. But it's pretty freaking notable when there's a Ku Klux Klan these days, just because generally speaking, people in the United States aren't interested in it. There's not a lot of people that want to be involved in that nonsense, so they're not, thankfully.

Right now, Islamic extremism, that's not the case. You know, there's a lot of people around the world who are really interested in it. And until that ideology is defeated, until that strain of -- of extremism is gone and people just don't want to do it -- look, Naziism is like that.

I mean, at one point, Naziism was, you know, the dominant viewpoint of a country, of multiple countries, when you throw fascism in there. And now, you know, there's a lot less interest in it thankfully around the globe, and we have a lot less Naziism.

That's the only way you do this, right? I mean, and I don't know how you do it with a group like Islamic extremism because it's so large. There's so many people that even if there's just an infinitesimal percentage of Islam that goes down this road, it's still almost impossible to stop.

PAT: You either stop it that way or by killing every single terrorist on the planet, which is difficult.

STU: Really difficult.

PAT: Very difficult.

STU: Well, look, that's how we approached Nazis, right? It wasn't like we were like, oh, you know what, actually, we don't agree with your universal health care plans. And that's why they HEP disputed Naziism. We did it with a bunch of bombs.

PAT: Yeah. Yes.

STU: Which is -- look, that's certainly part of it. But it's a lot harder here. When you talk about killing every terrorist, it's a lot difficult to figure out who those people are and how to do it. And we've seen attempts at that, certainly, in certain countries. And so far, there have been parts of it that have worked and parts of it that haven't. So, I mean, right now, ISIS is being pushed back. And we may wind up seeing ISIS go away, that part of it. But we also -- you could argue that parts of al-Qaeda have gone away and were replaced by ISIS, right? So it's such a difficult task to do this in any efficient way, especially without the support and really unified action of the world with the Nazis. You had a lot of that.

PAT: And the Islamic State has taken credit for this. The perpetrators of the Barcelona attack are soldiers of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls for targeting coalition states. I mean, is Spain really even heavily involved in the War on Terror?

JEFFY: With the open border campaigns in Europe, I mean, Spain, France, all of it, they're all -- I mean, that immigration process for the extremes -- you know, you said, you don't know who they are. Nobody knows who they are. So they're just there in those countries.

PAT: Right. But they don't seem to be -- they don't seem to be targeting the Sunni militant groups in Syria, certainly. They're not in Iraq. They're not in Afghanistan. Why Spain? Why are they targeting Spain?

STU: Well, yeah, Spain hasn't had a big attack in a while. 2004, they had a big attack. But it's been a while. This is the worst one since the 2004 attack. You know, I think --

PAT: That one killed 191 people. 191.

STU: Yeah.

PAT: Wounded 1800. It was a huge attack.

STU: Huge. And just -- Europe, in and of itself is just very vulnerable to these things. They have -- a lot of them have very lenient, to say the least, immigration policies.

JEFFY: Yes.

PAT: No guns.

STU: There's very little to push back. There's also very free immigration, relatively speaking between the countries.

PAT: Yeah.

STU: So even if you have a more restrictive policy on your border, when it comes to immigrants from the Middle East or whatever, they could come into a neighboring country and then across that border. So it becomes very difficult.

It would be like trying -- it would be like trying to figure out immigration among the 50 states. If we were constantly on the border trying to stop certain people going from Texas into Oklahoma. It would be really hard. And, you know, it's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's that type of arrangement. And, you know, it's difficult.

PAT: It also looks like police have caught everybody, but the driver, right? That's the last I heard, was that the driver fled on foot. And he's still -- the actual driver of the van has gotten away. To this point.

STU: And it seems like it was a bigger plot. An explosion they think was tied to this. There was another attack they think was tied to this, through family members.

PAT: Yeah, apparently they thwarted another attack.

STU: And they thwarted another one overnight, right? With five people trying to attempt an attack, and they shot all five of them.

JEFFY: Yeah. In HEP Cambrio? HEP Cambrio, Spain. And they -- again, you talked about showing the footage. That footage immediately was all of them dead on the sidewalk, showing where police had shot them.

PAT: Oh, wow.

JEFFY: Last night. After they got them.

PAT: I had not seen that.

JEFFY: Yeah, they were: The suspects are dead. Police have shot them. And there they are.

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